Software companies have had a rough year with IPOs. After Facebook, Groupon and Zynga shares came crashing down to an all time low, the market does not look very forgiving of software and internet companies going public. The culprit was said to be over valuation of companies. But among all this hoopla came another company that has garnered only positive responses ever since it went public. Workday, a cloud computing company that builds human resources, expenses, and finances managing applications went IPO on October 18th, 2012 with an initial offer at $28 per share. The company raised approximately $628 million in the offering and was valued at nearly $4 billion.

Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield put together this enterprise software firm in 2005 which has experienced an upward swing in its share prices. Not only did its stocks soar up 75 percent on the first day of trading but they have since maintained a steady pace of growth and the stocks now rest at approximately $50, an 80 percent increase from its original price.
Companies that go public without having earned a profit are not very reliable however Workday even without being profitable offers a clear customer acquisition and revenue models that make investors very confident. The company’s IPO was highly anticipated in the tech circles also because it had two industry veterans working on it. Aneel Bhasuri the enterprise software guru has scripted success stories such as PeopleSoft, which was later acquired by Oracle. He is also a partner at Greylock an esteemed VC firm and had placed wining bet on companies like Okta, ServiceNow, Cloudera among others.

Having generated a lot of goodwill in the market, it was the investors George Still, Greylock Partners and NEA who benefited the most from the successful IPO and Workday is certainly changing the rules for a successful IPO.